This invention generally relates to the design, creation, use, and management of networked products, physical devices, and sensors; heterogeneous data and information derived from the devices and associated computer applications and systems for effective human or machine interactions, decision making, and business purposes.
Intelligent device networking, sometimes referred to as the Internet of Things, is a rapidly evolving technological revolution. Intelligent device networking refers to physical devices, products, and sensors with varying levels of digital intelligence that can be connected to networks of varying scale, from a local area network to the Internet. Millions of such physical intelligent devices are connected to the Internet, with billions more anticipated as the Internet of Things evolves. The sheer volume of these types of devices and the huge amounts of data derived from the devices will require significant changes in current technological approaches to ensure that human users and computing systems can access, integrate, manage, and use the devices and their data in real time.
The evolution of intelligent device networking requires connected product providers to reconsider and investigate new methods for designing connected products. A connected product retains either a continuous or an intermittent network connection to a server in a way that current stand-alone and unconnected products do not. The server and associated infrastructure may be hosted directly by the provider, or the provider may contract the infrastructure and services from a third party. The data collected from the product via this connection gives the provider extensive new opportunities to better understand how customers make use of the product and how the product is performing. The connection also lets the connected product provider manage or control the product, to offer product data, remote management and analysis as an additional service to customers, or to design optional services and features into the product that can be initiated at any time requested. The networking of intelligent devices will lead to sharing of data and information among the devices and other web services, new and unforeseen business models, information services and applications, and product features that producers of connected products will need to implement at the design stage.
Technology solutions for the Internet of Things tend to focus on the connectivity of the products via typical client/server device management systems that usually store only the data and information that can be derived from, and are specific to the connected product. These data can be made available to other separate computing applications and systems, including business systems, but normally by Application Programming Interfaces (API's) requiring significant complex custom software development. In many cases, the custom software solutions are rigid, lack robustness, and are not portable between different systems and applications. Furthermore, implementing this kind of custom software is expensive and time consuming. Linking disparate systems by API is problematic for many reasons. Changes in one area of the system do not automatically propagate to all other parts of the systems which can cause parts of the system to break when other areas are upgraded or modified. Some capabilities not inherently known by the business systems may require significant duplication of the system functionality which also leads to a much less robust and overly complicated system. This also leads to a duplication of the API calls as multiple areas of one system may call the same data from another system.
The value of intelligent networked devices is best realized by unifying the connected products management system and the data and information that the system provides with complementary information contained in the enterprise systems of entities that manufacture or use the connected products. Unification of these systems and data allows the manufacturer to manage, monitor, and control their connected products within the same enterprise system that they use to manage their customer orders, inventory, billings, service, and relationship information. Currently these disparate systems are not unified and are generally not interoperable. Intelligent networked devices require flexible and scalable databases and servers that can accommodate heterogeneous and highly unstructured data. On the other hand, most enterprise systems are designed to provide rigid, relational structure for the data and information that they manage. As a result, current technology effectively places the unstructured data from networked devices in one silo, and the structured data for an enterprise system in another separate silo. This “silo effect” slows and limits the resulting collective intelligence that can be obtained to drive innovation, create new products and services, and enhance the design and value of intelligent networked devices.
These are serious limitations of current systems for intelligent device networking. The emergence of intelligent device networking requires more flexible, scalable, and compatible data and information technologies and software applications that can be unified with enterprise system software applications so that innovative new business models can emerge and drive the evolving Internet of Things forward. The present invention fulfills such a need.